Hi there. You know me; I’m a loyal customer and it’s like we’re old friends. And who better than an old friend to tell you when you need to get your head out of your ass?
Six weeks ago I bought a tool chest from you. Alas, it arrived damaged. I contacted you and you sent the UPS guy back to retrieve it. Which he did.
You contacted me three weeks ago to ask if I had made up my mind about this thing, and would I please ship it back as arranged? I told you I had. I gave you the tracking number off the receipt that the UPS guy gave me. After several more emails back and forth, you apologized and arranged for the refund. I thought this was resolved, and looked forward to not getting another visit from UPS (The guy has come back four times with a new order, saying “Didn’t I get one of these already?”)
Lo and behold, guess who rang the bell yesterday? The UPS guy. With a FIFTH new order to pick the toolchest up. Could you please pull someone off your goddamn Wish List Maintenance staff and get this snafu straightened out?
While you are at it, I hate the way you martyr yourself on shipping things separately. I suspect you ship items separately because they’re in different warehouses 2000 miles apart. That’s fine. Send them separately. But don’t send me the email gushing about how you’re going to shoulder the expense of shipping stuff separately “to serve me better,” like your sole motivation and justification is pleasing me. Those emails make it sound like one of your elves found my item in Aisle 14 and decided to just mail it to me right away as a special favor! I’ve ordered 7 items once and gotten 7 different emails–once for each shipped item!–telling me this. How about saying, at checkout, that even items supposedly shipped “together” might go separately, however is fastest. You make it obvious on the shipping invoice. I’m a bright girl, I can figure that out. I don’t give a crap about reading your self-congratulatory email about it.
Thank you for listening. You can now get back to not making a profit as usual.
You know what I like about Amazon? How they teamed up with Yahoo on their search engines. I type in “Goat Felchers” and lo-and-behold! There’s apparently a book I can buy about Goat Felchers on Amazon if only I click this little button on the right hand part of the screen. Turns out it’s just another search engine on Amazon’s site set to “Goat + Felchers” and ends up usually displaying titles like “Ethyl the Aardvark goes Quantity Surveying.” Thanks, but no thanks.
Now Barnes and Noble has taken over this fun practice of fooling you into believing there’s a book on everything you’re searching for.
Amazon will sell the names and addresses of people you’ve bought gifts for, along with information about what you bought them, to third parties. So if you send someone a gift through A.c, you’re opening them up to receive spam and junkmail. Nice, huh?
I don’t think that is entirely accurate lissener. I did some extensive (internet) research last year for a report I was writing on unfair business practices. I never saw any evidence that Amazon was selling names, and I was combing through the FTC (And other such sites) looking for any citations, court hearings, complaints, etc, etc. I never found any against Amazon. com. Though I guess I could have missed something.
The information we learn from customers helps us personalize and continually improve your shopping experience at Amazon.com. Here are the types of information we gather.
Information You Give Us: We receive and store any information you enter on our Web site or give us in any other way. Click here* to see examples of what we collect. . . .
[list]*. . . such information as your name, address, and phone number; credit card information; people to whom purchases have been shipped, including address and phone number; people (with addresses and phone numbers) listed in Gift-Click and 1-Click settings; e-mail addresses of Trusted Friends and other people; content of reviews and e-mails to us; personal description and photograph in About You; and financial information, including Social Security and driver’s license numbers. . . .[/ul][/list]
Good job of selective reading lissener. You said that Amazon sells information. On the same page you quote (about three paragraphs down) it says
"Does Amazon.com Share the Information It Receives?
Information about our customers is an important part of our business, and we are not in the business of selling it to others. We share customer information only with the subsidiaries Amazon.com, Inc., controls and as described below."
Looks like you were in such a hurry to stick your foot in your mouth that you quit reading too soon:
[continues after the above:] [ul]. . . We share customer information only with the subsidiaries Amazon.com, Inc., controls and as described below.
[li]Affiliated Businesses We Do Not Control: We work closely with our affiliated businesses, an example of which is drugstore.com, our Health & Beauty merchant. In some cases, these businesses operate stores at Amazon.com or sell offerings to you at Amazon.com. In other cases, we operate stores, provide services, or sell product lines jointly with these businesses. You can tell when another business is involved in your transactions, and we share customer information related to those transactions with that business.[/li][li]Agents: We employ other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Examples include fulfilling orders, delivering packages, sending postal mail and e-mail, removing repetitive information from customer lists, analyzing data, providing marketing assistance, processing credit card payments, and providing customer service. They have access to personal information needed to perform their functions, but may not use it for other purposes.[/li][li]Promotional Offers: Sometimes we send offers to selected groups of Amazon.com customers on behalf of other businesses. When we do this, we do not give that business your name and address. If you do not want to receive such offers, please adjust your Customer Communication Preferences.[/li][li]Business Transfers: As we continue to develop our business, we might sell or buy stores or assets. In such transactions, customer information generally is one of the transferred business assets. Also, in the unlikely event that Amazon.com, Inc., or substantially all of its assets are acquired, customer information will of course be one of the transferred assets.[/li][li]Protection of Amazon.com and Others: We release account and other personal information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with law; enforce or apply our Conditions of Use and other agreements; or protect the rights, property, or safety of Amazon.com, our users, or others. This includes exchanging information with other companies and organizations for fraud protection and credit risk reduction.[/li][li]With Your Consent: Other than as set out above [which is of course vague and inclusive enough to render the previous phrase meaningless], you will receive notice when information about you might go to third parties, and you will have an opportunity to choose not to share the information. [/ul][/li]
They make a point–twice–of saying that all the information they gather about their customers (see my previous post, and here) is a company asset, and as such they share it with all their subsidiaries and associated businesses (which, they point out, they “do not control”). They say they are “not in the business of selling it to others”–present tense–but have explicitly reserved the right to do so in the future (here’s an NPR story about it, in which Amazon.com announce “that whatever information it may have about its customers is now considered a company asset, and may be shared, transferred or sold.”).
Amazon is on my shit list this year. After saving my ass last Christmas by delivering packages to both Hawaii and Puerto Rico on time, it has screwed with me at every turn this year. Tell me that a product usually ships in 2-3 days then send me an e-mail a week later that it won’t ship until sometime between Dec. 15 and Dec. 27th. WTF??!! All of a sudden, several products available within days might not get here until after Christmas?
Then, I shop around to discover that, not only are Barnes and Noble and Borders shipping sooner, their prices are several dollars cheaper than Amazon. So much for that fabulous Amazon savings.
But really, it’s the lying about product availability that gets me. I ordered 1 book, 1 cd and 1 video on November 28. On December 8th, none of them have shipped and all of a sudden the video isn’t available (Dr. Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, starring Rowan Atkinson as Dr. Who). Those bastards!
Now back to your regularly scheduled Monty Python lovefest, already in progress.
I have to admit that I’m fairly annoyed at Amazon for their “We’re shipping part of your order now” bit. Twice I’ve ordered tools from them. While I’m there, thought I, I’ll order a few other things. Bits for drill. Nails for the tool I just ordered. Do I care when the bits arrive? Not a lot. Does it offend my Puritan spirit that Amazon is pissing away money shipping $3.00 worth of goods rather than giving me better prices on things I might order in the future? Yup. Do I wish that Amazon had a “Ship it all at once, I don’t care about the damn drill bits” button? Yup.
And of course, there’s that little matter of undermining the work of small independent bookstores and making life difficult for untested or controversial authors, etc., etc.
